(CNN) -- There's no escaping the fact that the Human Brain Project, with its billion-dollar plan to recreate the human mind inside a supercomputer, sounds like a science fiction nightmare.

But those involved hope their ambitious goal of simulating the tangle of neurons and synapses that power our thought processes could offer solutions to tackling conditions such as depression, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's.

The Human Brain venture is the next step in a long-running program that has already succeeded in using computers to create a virtual replica of part of a rat's neocortex -- a section of the brain believed to control higher functions such as conscious thought, movement and reasoning.

Scientists at its forerunner, the Switzerland-based Blue Brain Project, have been working since 2005 to feed a computer with vast quantities of data and algorithms produced from studying tiny slivers of rodent gray matter.

"It is a step that will need both a huge increase in funding and access to computers so advanced that they have yet to be built." "If their current bid for 1 billion ($1.3 billion) of European Commission funding over the next 10 years is successful, Markram predicts that his computer neuroscientists are a decade away from producing a synthetic mind that could, in theory, talk and interact in the same way humans do."

Guffaw. I recently made a related argument in one of my philosophy courses for why AI is likely a pipe dream.

For this in particular, despite a great deal of knowledge that’s been accumulated under of the umbrella of cognitive neuroscience research, we still don’t know much about how a brain actually works (much less mind itselfthe two are not necessarily equivalent phenomena).

Sounds like a nice waste of money at this point to attempt building functional models of brains inside of computers. Even if we possessed sufficient knowledge about how brains work, it may be the case that brains work in a way that could never be simulated in model via computers no matter how powerful, given the mathematical bounds of computability. At least not without introducing certain simplifying assumptions, simplifications which themselves may destroy the practical value of such a simulation.

Unless it has a quantum mechanical component to it, it will just be a big computer. Classical computers can simulate quantum mechanics, just not that efficiently. Here's a link to a discussion on whether quantum mechanics is central to simulating the brain.

They might well succeed simulating a conservative brain because it operates on logic. There are not enough logic gates in the universe to simulate a Commie Democrat brain. Democrat Commie brains can’t even understand reality; how in the world would you simulate that?

Classical computers can simulate quantum mechanics, just not that efficiently.

The operative word here is simulate in the sense of "approximate". Actual quantum mechanics is fraught with infinities which are gotten around via mathematical slight-of-hand designed to provide workable approximations to the hypothesized actual phenomena.

And even with these simplifications actual simulation of even the simplest quantum mechanical systems takes gargantuan amounts of computer resources. We are far, far away from being able to simulate anything as large as a single neuron at a quantum level, much less an actual brain.

But beyond that the science is backwards because it presumes that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter when quantum mechanics itself has told us repeatedly over the past century that matter is an emergent phenomenon of consciousness.

It's been well noted that AI has been the "next big thing" for 60 years and counting. These sort of projects make for great press, but don't hold your breath.

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